The Supreme Court reinforced an earlier ruling from 1995 saying investigators must get approval from a specifically-designated prosecutor before they begin any wiretaps.File photo

TRENTON — The case began four years ago, when a 13-year-old Newark girl told detectives that her father had been sexually assaulting her since she was 11.

Child-abuse investigators at the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office arranged a wiretap authorized by her mother. The girl phoned her father, and detectives listened in as he made several incriminating remarks, they alleged.

She hung up. Ten minutes passed.

And then, once the wiretap had ended, it was finally approved by the right official.

The recording has to be thrown out in that case, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 7-0 decision, reinforcing a ruling it handed down in 1995 that said such monitoring has to be approved before placing any phone calls.

"The Legislature determined not to leave police officers to their unfettered discretion, fearing that too much investigative latitude might lead to abuses of privacy," the court said, quoting that earlier decision.

"No such interception shall be made without the prior approval of the attorney general or his designee or a county prosecutor or his designee," they added, quoting from the state law governing wiretaps.

Neither the girl nor the father is named in court papers. The man’s trial on a 32-count indictment alleging a pattern of serious sexual assaults had been on hold but is now back on track, said Katherine Carter, a spokeswoman for the Essex prosecutor’s office.

"We plan to move forward with the case even in light of the decision today," she said.

A prosecutor handling child-abuse cases for the county did not know who had the power to authorize the phone monitoring, and it wasn’t until after the call ended that a high-ranking prosecutor signed the paperwork, the Supreme Court said, affirming two lower courts’ decisions to suppress the evidence.

When the trial court threw out the father’s phone statements, the state Attorney General’s Office appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that investigators would have discovered the same evidence inevitably if not for an "honest mistake."

But the Wiretap Act’s tough standards hold up even then, and even when one of the parties agrees to be monitored, as the girl’s mother had done, the court said.

"We are very disappointed in the outcome," said Lee Moore, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office. "We had hoped that the court would have at least accepted the application of the inevitable discovery doctrine, which would have allowed the consensual recordings to be admitted into evidence."

The high court had issued a nearly identical ruling in 1995. This time, the Attorney General’s Office also argued that because state lawmakers amended the Wiretap Act in 1999 — removing a requirement that a prosecutor find "reasonable suspicion" before authorizing a wiretap like the one the Newark girl agreed to — the standards were looser on approving wiretaps. That didn’t sway the Supreme Court, either.

Diane Toscano, the public defender representing the father on appeal, said the justices merely "interpreted the (Wiretap Act) in its plain meaning."